Theology Kills | The Heroine’s Journey:  Eve, Mary, and The Trap of Trying to Do It All “Right” 

What if Christian faith isn’t about being correct, but about being creative? January Jaxon and Andrew McRae explore Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey through two of history’s most famous women: Eve, the mother of all, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. From the Fall to the Cross, they unveil a spiritual adventure that transforms shame, violence, and mimetic rivalry into trust, integrity, and creative power.

You’ll hear:

A fresh theological reading of Eve and Mary
Why creativity — not correct behavior — brings love into the world
The 10 stages of the Creative Journey
Real stories about freezing in moments when love called us to act — and what it takes to become the kind of people who can say yes

PLUS practices of Sabbath, stillness, and open-focus attention that make space for that shift to begin.

“Honestly, I was skeptical — but this was lots of fun to listen to. Extremely relatable and a great chemistry/dynamic between the cohosts. This changed my idea of what a Christian podcast is.”
—Matthew Gordon

Ideal for listeners interested in Girardian theology, Internal Family Systems as a spiritual practice, and the theological legacy of women in Christian scripture.

Chapters:

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:17) - Presentation: The Theology of The Heroine's Journey
(23:19) - Where do these ideas become experiences?
(32:35) - How can we move from paralysis to action?
(38:26) - The 10 Stages of the Creative's Journey
(44:21) - What's significant about Being?
(51:33) - Why do over-Doing and Gathering Allies go together?
(55:53) - How are obstacles a blessing?!
(01:00:17) - The social element of success
(01:02:36) - Can we actually practice awakening?
(01:06:15) - It's a Journey, not a destination
(01:09:47) - The role of Initiation
(01:17:24) - When yearning feels like dissatisfaction
(01:20:55) - Who's actually doing the Healing?
(01:25:48) - Broken trust and broken faith
(01:38:02) - When does our Doing get wounded?
(01:41:15) - Balancing Being with Doing
(01:50:33) - The practice of stillness, Sabbath, and open focus
(02:01:02) - End Credits

Theology Kills is exclusively listener-funded. Subscribe to us on Patreon for bonus audio, downloadable worksheets, and a friendly community to carry on the conversation.
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Note: This podcast is a personal exploration of theology, creativity, and human experience. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae are not medical or mental health professionals, and nothing in this podcast should be understood as medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Our discussions are general and are not a substitute for personalized care. If you need medical or mental health support, we encourage you to seek care from a qualified professional.

Creators and Guests

Host

Andrew McRae

Co-host

Host

January Jaxon

Co-host

What is Theology Kills?

Toxic theologies have been weaponized to wound, but the gospel was always meant to be medicine. January Jaxon and Andrew McRae blend Internal Family Systems theory with the mimetic anthropology of René Girard to uncover a Christ-centered theology of integrity that heals shame, fosters embodiment, and creates contagious peace in the midst of a world at war. Balancing scriptural insight with personal reflections and simple everyday practices, each episode explores the ways that violence warps our creativity, our relationships, and our sense of self — and how divine love sets us free.

[00:00:00] Andrew: We recently heard a definition from Elizabeth Gilbert for faith, and she said, “Faith is relaxing completely in the presence of somebody you know is very fond of you.”

[00:00:12] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:00:14] Andrew: It’s a beautiful definition. I think it’s spot on. Relaxing. Completely relaxed in the presence of someone, and partly, I think, because you’re in the presence of someone

[00:00:25] January: Yes.

[00:00:25] Andrew: is how you’re relaxing. This someone that you know is fond — not that you think might think, but like it’s so obvious, this person is fond. There’s not any question of whether this person likes you, right? And so in that situation, that’s when you have faith.

[00:00:44] January: If you’ve ever wondered why a religion that proclaims unconditional love can feel so full of hatred, shame, and violence, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong to want something more from Christian faith.

I’m January Jaxon,

[00:00:59] Andrew: and I’m Andrew McRae,

[00:01:01] January: and this is Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive.

[00:01:17] January: A few years ago, I walked out of my bedroom late one night to find my living room flashing with blue and red light. Alarmed, I rushed across the room and looked down at the street below my apartment. Three police vehicles had parked up, and when I say parked up, I mean they were halfway up on the sidewalk surrounding the little sheltered bus stop right under my window.

Several officers were milling around. One of them was roping off the area with caution tape. A couple of them were talking with passersby, directing them safely around the incident. And three of them stood, arms crossed, over the huddled figure of a man who was curled up on the concrete floor of that shelter.

Now I knew that man. His name was Theodore. He was one of the homeless folks who frequented my neighborhood. I’d spoken to him often. I bought him lunch at the coffee shop whenever I ran into him there.

I liked him.

I couldn’t tell precisely what the trouble was from four stories up, but as far as I could guess, Theodore had decided to sleep in the bus shelter. It was a cold night in February. There was a real possibility of snow, so he’d snuggled himself into his sleeping bag and found himself a shelter.

I don’t know whether someone took issue with that and called the police, or whether one of the patrol cars had been out scouting for unhoused folks and trying to get them indoors before the snow hit. They weren’t hassling Theodore, exactly. They just seemed exhausted and disgusted with his stubborn refusal to let them move him.

They’d try to help him up, and he’d just roll away from them and curl further into his sleeping bag. Watching this scene, I was seized by an intense impulse to go downstairs and help Theodore. I had no idea what help he might need. I still had no idea what was really going on, but I was a familiar face who could sit next to him on that sidewalk and be a warm presence in a stressful moment. My soul had a longing to be a neighbor to him.

I didn’t do it.

I stood immobile at that window for another 20 minutes as the police finally got Theodore upright and into one of their vehicles. I found myself paralyzed by a barrage of questions. What if I’m a hindrance instead of a help? What if Theodore’s intoxicated and doesn’t recognize me? What if I scare him instead of reassuring him? What if the police arrest me for interfering with whatever it is they think they’re doing? What if? What if? What if?

In that moment of anxiety, I was no longer grounded in my own body. My awareness had split. With all those questions, I was picturing myself from the outside through the imagined judgment of others. And this problem is as ancient as Eve’s temptation in the garden.

If you’re listening to this podcast, I take it on trust that you care about making the world a better place. But I’m guessing you’ve probably also had a few moments similar to mine, moments where you were confronted by a clear opportunity to stand beside a vulnerable person, but instead, you froze up because you couldn’t figure out what was the right thing to do.

The right thing to do can become a trap when it gets tangled up with what will people think.

The reality is that there is no morally perfect choice. There’s nothing you can choose that will be beyond reproach that nobody can take issue with. You’re gonna have to make a choice that opens you up to criticism. So how do we get solid enough inside ourselves that that criticism doesn’t derail us and stop us from taking action?

The truth is that creativity, not correct behavior, is how the love of God is born into the world through us. And creativity requires — requires! — that we are willing to risk being wrong.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, gets pregnant out of wedlock. She is absolutely not correctly behaved according to the laws of her culture. Laws that are supposedly God given! God had to personally intervene to stop Joseph from breaking his engagement to Mary and sending her away in quiet disgrace. But it wasn’t Mary who broke her culture’s law. She didn’t get herself pregnant. It was the Holy Spirit. It was the love of God that broke the rules and empowered Mary to give birth to the child of God.

Mary’s culture tells her left, right, and center that she is wrong to say yes to this pregnancy, but Mary steps into that place of social condemnation, totally unfazed and creates the savior of us all.

I stumbled a few years back over the work of Maureen Murdock, who was a student of mythologist Joseph Campbell. Murdock felt strongly that Campbell’s famous Hero’s Journey failed to reflect some critical components of her experience as a woman. So she developed Campbell’s work further and created the Heroine’s Journey, and as soon as I saw it, I thought — this is the story of Christian scripture!

Now, I’m of a generation that grew up with a lot of transgender friends, so I tend to get easily frustrated with what I perceive to be the unnecessary gendering of what I think are pretty universally human experiences. I think gender often becomes a stumbling block where we can’t see ourselves reflected in a story because these really limiting labels have been applied to it.

So I experimented a little with creating my own adaptation of Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey. I tried to find language that spoke to the deeper forces of what she was pointing to without using the gendered language of masculine and feminine, so that we wouldn’t get hung up on questions about who this journey is for.

This journey is for everybody.

What spoke to me in her cycle and what I saw so clearly reflected in the Bible was the tension between Being and Doing. Being and Doing represent two fundamental ways of engaging with the world. Being is rooted in receptivity, presence and trust. It’s trusting God when he says that we are very good without striving to control or to prove ourselves.

Doing is about action, effort, exerting influence. It’s the drive to achieve and to make things happen. Both are necessary for a full and creative life, but when we build our identities around Doing at the expense of our Being, it becomes a trap that leads us into a life of anxiety, striving, and eventually burnout.

The Heroine’s Journey, which I’m gonna call the Creative Journey from now on, is the path of restoring us to our Being, of reintegrating these forces when they inevitably become disconnected in us. It’s not about getting rid of our Doing. It’s learning to act from a place of deep presence to the love of God so that love is what we embody to others through our actions.

So that love is what we create in the world.

Eve represents the first half of the cycle, a break from our Being and a desperate attempt to fix ourselves through endless Doing. Mary represents the second half: recognizing that we’ve split, coming home to ourselves, and learning how to act in the world, how to Do, from a place of deeply grounded Being.

The centuries between Eve and Mary are the story of humanity, stumbling, failing, and being drawn back again and again toward God’s creative way of life.

So we start with the story of Eve. She begins in the Garden of Eden. Life is perfect. God has completed the work of creation and has said that it is very good. Eve and Adam have everything they want up until the day that a serpent slithers into the picture and tells Eve that actually what she needs is that fruit over there. He implies but doesn’t say outright that without that fruit she is somehow deficient, that she’s lacking in wisdom she ought to have.

And our Eve, bless her, in that moment her awareness splits. She’s no longer looking out at the world through her own eyes. She’s no longer grounded in her own experience. Now she’s imagining herself in the serpent’s — well, shoes — and she’s assessing herself through the serpent’s gaze. Part of her still feels her own experience, but part of her now stands outside her herself judging herself instead of trusting God’s voice that she is very good just as she is, Genesis 1, verse 31. Instead, Eve believes the serpent’s lie: you are not enough [Separation from our Being].

Let’s pause here for just a moment. Everybody, take a deep breath.

What do you notice in your body when you hear someone say,

[00:09:47] Andrew: “You’re defective, you, you’re a problem, Well, maybe not the problem. Let’s not pretend you’re that important, but you’re a problem and you need to be fixed.”

[00:09:58] January: I feel my throat close up. My stomach feels a bit nauseated. My breathing gets shallow. I kind of curve in on myself, like I’m trying to protect my vital organs from a blow. These are symptoms of pain, real physical pain. Our brains don’t know the difference between the pain of physical harm and the emotional pain of social criticism. It lights up the same receptors in our brains.

So Eve experiences this terrible pain, this split of her awareness, so that part of her is looking back at herself and taking on someone else’s opinions about her, and she grabs at a solution [Identification with Doing]. She takes control and she does something to fix what that person thinks is wrong with her by eating the fruit.

Then she Gathers an Ally by sharing the fruit with Adam, converting him to her way of thinking. So now they’re both split. Now they’re both seeing themselves through the serpent’s distorted gaze. And the fruit does do something. Their eyes are opened, but not to wisdom.

It’s very popular to scorn and dismiss Christianity because of this scene, because a god who would want to keep us from knowledge is obviously a god who shouldn’t be trusted, but the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not the tree of wisdom. What their eyes are opened to in Genesis 3, verse 7 is not correct moral judgment. It’s just judgment, the ability to split things into good and bad buckets. And with this ability, they suddenly recognize themselves to be naked, vulnerable, exposed.

They’ve been that way the whole time, and it wasn’t a problem! God said they were fine that way! But through the serpent’s eyes, Eve and Adam judge their vulnerability to be bad, and they feel ashamed. And so this split consciousness, this way of standing outside ourselves and judging ourselves, this is what takes Eve and Adam out of Paradise, out of Eden, and sets them on a road of constant trials.

This constant mental assessment of themselves drives them into a life of perpetual doing [Road of Trials], always striving to control themselves and their environment and prove to themselves that they’re enough. To get out from under the pain of feeling bad.

Now Adam and Eve do find some measurable degree of success this way. After all, they give birth to the foundations of human civilization. That’s no small achievement. They are celebrated for this, what the Journey calls the False Validation of Worldly Success. But the children they create this way are Cain and Abel, a pair of brothers, one of whom is peaceful and loves God, and one of whom is rivalrous and murderous. It becomes clear within a single generation that what Adam and Eve have brought into the world is violence, spiritual starvation, and death. In other words, nothing they’re doing with all that striving is leading to actual aliveness. This is the gradual Awakening to the Emptiness of Perpetual Doing.

There can be no rest if one’s life depends on control.

What follows is multiple millennia of Israel undergoing what Murdock and Campbell called the Initiation and Descent. I think of it as our collective come-to-Jesus moment. It is a gradual process of disillusioning, which sounds awful, but what we’re doing is coming home to reality, and that can only be a good thing.

It’s a hard process though. Israel struggles, learns, forgets and struggles again. Doing gets us into trouble. God brings us home to reality. Next thing you know we’re Doing again.

It takes us a long time to learn.

Finally, though Israel manages to produce Mary. She is Eve’s inverse. She trusts God where Eve couldn’t. She ignores shame where Eve was driven by it. Mary trusts completely in her Being, which means her entire identity is in God’s love, not in whether she herself is good or bad. It’s not that she doesn’t make moral judgments about herself, she just doesn’t give them the last word on who she is. She trusts God’s eternal and loving perspective more than she trusts her own tiny, limited perspective.

Mary doesn’t herself experience the seventh and eighth stages of the Creative Journey, the Urgent Yearning to Reconnect with Our Being and the Healing of Our Broken Trust in Our Being, because Mary never distrusts her Being. God comes knocking and she says yes without waiting to hear how she’s supposed to make it happen. She’s totally unconcerned about being a failure because she knows it’s up to God to make it happen, not up to her. Complete confidence in her creative consent.

And precisely because she begins from this place of Being with God, Mary is then able to do this thing for God in a way that embodies God’s nonviolent love in the world. This is where we Heal Our Wounded Doing. We’re not trying to get rid of our Doing. We are not after a future where we don’t take any action.

We’re not here trying to be spiritual doormats sitting around, waiting for life to happen to us. Receptivity is not passivity. Rather, action flows naturally out of that place of total confidence in God’s goodness and our own belovedness. This is what Mary models for us.

Mary’s yes is not merely obedience. It is radical creativity. She steps into an impossible, even scandalous situation with no roadmap, no safety net. She doesn’t know how it’ll work. She only knows that God’s love is trustworthy, and so she consents to be the vessel for something new.

The result is Christ the perfect [Integration] Balance of Being and Doing. Christ is doing miracles left and right, but he’s doing them from a place of deep rest in and relationship with God. He’s receiving his power from the Father and then acting in the world with what he has received.

This, my friends, is the story of Christian creativity. Divine creativity is something we receive, not something we achieve. The creation of new life requires both receptive and exertive forces. Two receivers won’t do and neither will two exerters.

Again, this is not a question of gender. Eve and Mary are both women. But one’s a receiver and one’s an exerter. Anyone of any gender can embody either of these approaches. The point is that whether it’s biological life or spiritual life, we need to encounter something unlike ourselves for the creative impulse to produce new life.

If we never step outside our comfort zone, if we never depart from what we are certain of, no aliveness is possible. So Eve’s story shows us the Separation from Our Being, the over-Identification with Doing, and the culture of control and violence that is created by that split.

The snake’s snide comment about Eve’s supposed deficiency, gets under her skin. To get out from under the painful shame. She tries to take action to fix herself. She attempts to control. Eve strives to be correct.

The immediate result — the heir Eve creates — is Cain who kills his brother Abel. We’re gonna talk more about that in a later episode, but this is a tragic story reflecting a painful reality about the violence and rivalry endemic to the earliest origins of human civilization. As that violence multiplies and calcifies over time, the eventual result is Christ’s crucifixion.

But God is always at work to get us out of our muddle. Mary’s story shows us the return to our Being, the healing of our wounded doing, and the culture of divine love that is born from that integrity.

I take it on trust that Mary is smart enough to know she’s going to have a pile of social shame dumped on her by her culture for being pregnant out of wedlock. But she says yes. When God asks something, inconceivably wild of her, she doesn’t exert. She doesn’t control. She doesn’t try to figure out how she’s supposed to do it. Quite the opposite. Luke 1, verse 34, “How can this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” It sounds bananas to her. She doesn’t get it at all, but she consents to receive and embody the power that God gives her. The child she brings into the world is Christ Jesus, God’s word incarnate, the eternal life of God fully embodied on earth. The first truly human being.

Let me say that again. We are not yet fully human. We are children learning at the feet of God. God is the one who is fully human.

Christ is the image of the power and peace we humans can hopefully grow up into when we take this discipleship stuff seriously. Jesus himself says, “Truly, I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.” [John 14, verse 12.]

When we insist on controlling like Eve, we exert violence and the victim of our violence is God. When we receive, like Mary, God remains the exerter and what God exerts is love. What Mary gives birth to is life — God’s life — alive in us and in all creation.

Creativity, not correct behavior, is how the love of God comes into the world.

A couple of years ago, I was at a gas station filling my tank on my lunch break from my office job. And as I’m standing at the pump, a young man walks up to me. He’s got a black eye that’s puffy and swelling. He’s covered in scratches and bruises. Nothing looks critically damaged, but he’s a mess.

He asks me politely if he can give me $20 to give him a ride to his friend’s house in the next town over. He explains that he’s just been attacked. His brother, he tells me, is in a gang, and even though he’s not himself involved, some rival gang members recognized him as his brother’s sibling and dragged him into a fight. He’d managed to get away from them, but he wanted to get out of the area to interrupt the violence and avoid any further confrontation. He didn’t want any trouble. He just wanted to get someplace safe.

My brain launched straight into questions just like it did when confronted with Theodore’s situation. What’s the right thing to do here? But this time I wasn’t paralyzed by the questions. This time I was in touch with my Being. As each question flashed through my mind, I felt an answer rise up inside me.

What if I let this kid in my car and he has a gun? Eh, the worst thing he can do is kill me. I’m baptized. What do I have to fear from death?

What if he steals my car and leaves me stranded? Eh, my car is replaceable. This boy’s life is not.

What if he has injuries I can’t see, and I end up on the hook for manslaughter because I took him to a friend’s house instead of to a hospital? Well, I will offer to take him to a hospital. Then I will respect his answer, whatever he chooses. It’s his life.

I still don’t know if giving him a ride was the right thing to do. For all I know, he could have been part of the gang. Maybe I was helping him escape from the police! But ultimately, only one question mattered: what is my integrity asking me to do here? And the answer to that one was clear: Be a neighbor.

There was a vulnerable human being in front of me, asking me for help, help that it would cost me virtually nothing to give. So I accepted the courage God offered me to do something way outside my comfort zone, and I chose a creative solution, not a correct one.

I said yes.

And as he climbed into my car, he said, “I’ve asked a dozen people for a ride in the last half hour. You were the only one willing to look me in the eye. You were the only person willing to see me.”

Creativity, not correct behavior, is how the love of God is born into the world through

us.

Alright Andrew, I know we’re both incredibly excited about this, so why don’t we just jump in. Tell me what resonated with your experience? What touched on things that you’ve personally gone through?

[00:23:42] Andrew: Your opening.

[00:23:44] January: Mm, yeah. The dithering.

[00:23:46] Andrew: Yeah. Dithering is such an inoffensive way to put it, like it’s harmless. Or what’s, what’s the word? The benign way to think of inaction. The occasions it brought to my mind were, when I was — twice, I was walking down the street, and I was witnessing what I can only assume was domestic violence of some sort.

[00:24:05] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:05] Andrew: I don’t know. One time I’d just moved to Casablanca and I’m just walking around like, “Hey, Casablanca, they made a movie about this city. Now I’m here. I’m gonna go walk around and oh look, there’s a giant wall that looks ancient. That must be the Old City!”

Another thing you learn, if you go to Morocco, you don’t do that without finding a companion in 0.02 seconds. Somebody’s gonna be there, “Oh, let me show you around! My cousin owns a restaurant and it’s really clean. You wanna come?”

Anyway, they will not lose the invitation to be your tour guide, your guide through life and everything. And so I’m walking down the street with this guy that’s presumed to be my guide and wants to, who knows? He maybe wants to help me find an apartment. I don’t remember. But he’s ingratiating himself to me. He’s showing me around the Old City and there’s just this giant, like, this dude’s really upset at a woman. There’s a bike, and he’s yelling, and I can’t remember if he’s shoving her with the bike…

[00:24:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:00] Andrew: And my guide, you can see he’s sort of like, “Ugh, you can move.” And I remember I stopped like, “Uh, is that normal? Like you don’t normally treat people like that, do you?” And he was like, “Oh, it’s the sun. It’s hot and the sun makes people crazy.” And I was like, “I don’t know. That’s...”

[00:25:16] January: So he was trying to move you away from it and direct you somewhere else?

[00:25:19] Andrew: Precisely. I was resistant to that for a while, but eventually that’s what we did. And at no point did it ever occur to me that maybe I need to, like, talking to this guy about this is not... I mean, just completely stymied about what to do.

[00:25:36] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:37] Andrew: I could talk about it, but I could not interact with it.

[00:25:41] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:42] Andrew: Dithering sounds so benign, but if she didn’t get hurt that day, all signs are pointing to she’s gonna get hurt or has been already.

But the other occasion, very similar, again, man and a woman, this time, not Morocco, it was Beirut. And walking down a city street, this guy has grabbed a woman. I think he has her by the arms?

I don’t think I walked to the other side of the street, like cliché, but I was walking down the sidewalk. They’re in the way. He’s shaking her violently, yelling. I can’t remember if I smelled alcohol or not. May have. But yeah, I walked by. I did not say anything. I don’t remember what ‘What if?’ questions I was asking myself, but I’m sure they were there.

[00:26:30] January: Your memory is of a sense of dithering?

[00:26:33] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I — so I don’t know, those questions you’re asking in the presentation, to your recollection, are those exact thoughts that you had or is that generic, “Oh, I was probably thinking, you know, what if I’m not a help, what if the police think I’m in the way?” Or are you pretty sure this is an account of your mental monologue during those 20 minutes?

[00:26:57] January: With that specific example, yes, I am confident that those were the exact thoughts going through my head. I did extensive journaling about it the next day and that kind of thing to unpack the situation. I have in my journal the records of the specific things that were going through my head.

So in that instance, I do know what it was. But that was not the only time that that ever happened in my life. There are so many times that I know that I was looking at something that didn’t feel right, but for whatever reason, I had a story in my head that I wasn’t allowed to do anything, that I wasn’t allowed to intervene, that I didn’t have a right to speak up or it was dangerous to speak up or most of the time it was just a sense of I don’t know what to do here.

And I know that that’s a very familiar feeling for a lot of people. You’re certainly not the only person who’s ever gone through this, and neither am I. And I would say that generally I don’t remember what it was that was going through my head.

[00:27:52] Andrew: Yeah, I was prepared to ask if I should make a big deal of the fact that I can’t even remember what the thoughts were, although I’m sure I came up with rationalizations or stories to tell myself why I shouldn’t intervene, but

[00:28:03] January: Of course you did.

[00:28:04] Andrew: it’s probably like you said, you journaled about it the next day. You had reasons to be sensitive to a situation of that nature. I’m sure I would’ve rehearsed what I could have said

[00:28:15] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:16] Andrew: in both French and Arabic afterwards

[00:28:19] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:19] Andrew: as language practice. Although it would’ve felt more important than language practice, but

[00:28:24] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:25] Andrew: I would’ve taken the time to do that. Maybe not written anything down, but I’m sure that would’ve — anything that’s interesting, or frightening, when you’re learning the language, you’re like, “Oh, how do I say this?”

[00:28:35] January: So sitting here now, in this moment, years later, do you have a sense of what you would have liked to do in that moment?

[00:28:45] Andrew: No clue, honestly.

[00:28:48] January: Hmm. I mean, I’m hearing you say that you would have liked to interrupt it in some way.

[00:28:53] Andrew: Yeah. I guess I jumped to what would’ve been a good way to interrupt it, and a safe way

[00:28:58] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:58] Andrew: for everybody involved.

[00:28:59] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:29:00] Andrew: Which is

[00:29:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:01] Andrew: a giant leap, right? What if instead of walked around, I just stopped and let him see me instead of her?

[00:29:10] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:11] Andrew: Maybe let her see me and see if her eyes say something. Maybe there’s something eye contact could have done.

If Interruption were a person, I wish I had given her a chance. And she would’ve needed me in that moment. He was not about to be interrupted or meet Interruption. She was not in any position to welcome Interruption. Perhaps there could have been an embodiment of Interruption in me. It’s so hard not to jump to like, yeah, but how, how do you do that? How do you effectuate

[00:29:46] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:47] Andrew: that, how does that happen? What’s the right way to do it? What’s the safe way to do it? But I don’t need answers to those questions to know the answers to the first one.

[00:29:55] January: So your integrity would’ve been asking you to interrupt this moment of potential violence just like I was having that moment of wanting to be a neighbor to Theodore.

That was the longing from my integrity. It sounds like Interruption was the longing from your integrity.

[00:30:11] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:30:12] January: And then we both got stuck on, okay, but how do we do that? How do we go about this?

[00:30:18] Andrew: Yeah, I’m sure I came up with words later. I’m sure.

[00:30:24] January: Mm-hmm.

And that’s part of the process too. We’re not going to be able to step into every moment that the world presents us with to take action. We’re just not. We have to learn how to do that over time. And reflecting on that interaction and finding the words that we wish we would’ve said is part of that process. Because then next time maybe the words will come up ‘cause we thought about them last time.

The challenge for a lot of us is that, then next time comes up and we’re still paralyzed

[00:30:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:30:57] January: and we still don’t do anything. Speaking for myself here, ‘cause I’m very good at overthinking that and being like, “I would’ve said this and I would’ve said this, and then I would’ve said this.”

And have I ever actually turned around and then said that? Mostly, no. Mostly no.

[00:31:15] Andrew: Do you feel like, I mean, I shared a personal experience that was from decades ago but yeah, your presentation took me back there immediately.

At first, I read it, and then, I listened to it and then I read it again and... Are we lobbing this question to you? I mean, you wrote the presentation, so I feel like we sort of know where that fits in your personal experience, but you’re not the same person that, I mean, I don’t know. I don’t wanna leave you out of that question because this isn’t just the January’s Ideas and Andrew’s Feelings podcast, obviously. We need to get your feelings in there too.

[00:31:45] January: Sorry, I’m laughing ‘cause my brain is instantly like, “Okay but that would be fun...!”

Different podcast. Okay. Rein it in.

[00:32:00] Andrew: Yeah, so we could probably do that. “January Talks to Andrew and Andrew Feels Like Crying.” We could just, that’d just be the whole podcast and then we could find different ways that that’s happened. It did happen today. Like, yeah, no, that was, that was a miserable thing to recollect. Absolutely miserable.

[00:32:19] January: Mm-hmm. I could see that in your face. Yeah. Yeah. I’m proud of you for being willing to go there and thank you for the honor of sharing it. It is painful to have to think about those moments.

[00:32:33] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:36] Andrew: Anyway. So the presentation is bookended by two sets of questions and they’re what if questions. I’m thinking about the incident with Theodore and you’re watching him from four floors up. What if I don’t help? What if I scare him? What if the police are upset and think I’m interfering? Right. The second set of questions about the guy with the messed-up face that’s been in a fight. What if I let him in my car and he has a gun? What if he steals my car and leaves me stranded? What if he’s injured and ends up dead? Can I be responsible?

The first set of questions, while they were a form of paralysis, it seems like they weren’t actually questions so much as an imperative of stop, stop, stop. No, you’re not gonna do that. It seems like they hog tied you. The second set of questions seemed like they were genuine questions, or at least curious enough to be open to a response. And you had an answer. Maybe not every question can be answered, but there’s a certain lack of response that’s just like STOP in the first set whereas the second set — and you describe it so clearly, you know, one split your awareness, in the other you maintained integrity — you, the world, neighbors, God, all of it hung together, in the second occasion.

But my question is do you have any inclination as to why? I think I can see what went different, but why do you think it did go different in those two occasions?

[00:34:06] January: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, one of the things that I think I say in the script is that I was more in touch with my own being the second time around. When that first instance happened, it was right after my life had fallen apart and I didn’t feel like I had a firm place to stand on anything.

The way that I ran my life for 35 years was, what does somebody else think I should be doing about this? There was no point at which I paused and said, what do I want to do about this? What do I feel moved to do about this? Every once in a while, I would get lucky and I would sort of stumble over that response, usually in reaction to somebody telling me to do something where I was like, “NOPE.” Not gonna do that!

So yeah, for most of my life it was a constant battle between, I would say people pleasing and rebellion, which are flip sides of the same coin. As Glennon Doyle is always saying, rebellion is the same cage as obedience. That trying to run your life according to somebody else’s external standard is just a trap.

It’s just a trap, which was what I experienced in that moment with Theodore. And it’s interesting because looking back at it, I think that I could have come up with answers to the questions that I was asking in those moments, if I had been able to pause, if I had been able to give myself space and let those answers rise up in me like I did with the other guy.

I wish that I could remember that boy’s name. I feel like such an asshole that I don’t! I know he told me. We had a lengthy conversation about it. Don’t remember it.

[00:35:38] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:35:39] January: Here we are. But yeah, when that first thing happened, I didn’t have any connection to a core Self inside me almost at all. I could tell that it existed, in there somewhere, I think. Maybe I just trusted that it existed, but I didn’t have any idea how to answer that question of what did I want?

What even was that? That was just confusing to my brain. It was like I didn’t even understand how the words fit together. I know all the words, but they don’t make any sense. It took a lot of years of serious work and therapy and soul searching and Bible study and all of these things to start to develop a personhood, or I guess to recognize the personhood that was inside me.

And so I had done a lot more of that work by the time I got to that second instance. And I knew enough to slow down and pause and make a space where those answers could come up inside me and I could go, okay, this is how I’m feeling about it. And I got lucky that I had had enough practice with it by that point in my life that it happened fairly quickly. The answers came up very quickly.

There are still a lot of situations, I mean, I’ve been doing this inner work thing for a little over five years now and I managed to do a lot in a very short amount of time. All things considered, that is really not a long time to grow up to the degree that I have.

But most conversations, if somebody asked me what I want in the middle of that conversation, I won’t know. I won’t have access to that information live in the moment. I’ll figure it out an hour later, or a day later, or a week later, when I finally have

[00:37:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:37:13] January: space to just pause and breathe.

So I was very lucky that in that moment that the boy came up, I was very in touch with what my system was saying. I could feel the strangeness of the moment. I could feel the fear happening in my nervous system, but it wasn’t running the show. And that was kind of a new experience for me at the time.

I was like. Oh, is this what life could be like? That’s amazing.

[00:37:37] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah

[00:37:39] January: So I was able to do this thing that my rational brain was like, what the fuck are you thinking, letting a strange dude into your car? Who does that?

And that was exactly the response of my coworkers, I got back to my office, and my team is entirely women. They were all like, what the fuck were you thinking? I was like, but there was a kid standing in front of me just bleeding and asking for my help. What was I going to do? Say no?

[00:38:04] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:38:06] January: And clearly lots of people had, and that is a response, right?

Everybody gets to decide where that level of safety is for them in that moment, and I’m not about to judge anybody for making whatever decision is right for them. But that was the decision that was right for me, which was a new experience. I had never had that experience before.

[00:38:26] Andrew: In the presentation, you’ve got an extensive discussion on this cycle of 10 moments, and there’s a diagram that’s really helpful to look at, but our listeners can’t see what I see. Tell them what am I looking at right now?

[00:38:40] January: Yeah! So there’s a circle, and starting at the top of the circle and moving clockwise, we start with Separation from Our Being. That’s that split of our integrity into multiple parts. Then we move into the Identification with Doing and the Gathering of Allies, which admittedly, I probably should have called the Over-identification With Doing. ‘Cause as I emphasize multiple times, it’s not about getting rid of our Doing, it’s just when we’re identified with Doing at the expense of our Being, which is that split. That moves into the Road of Trials, which is the perpetual challenges that are talked about in the Hero’s Journey where you meet obstacles and they grow you as a person.

That turns into the False Validation of Social Success, which I’m not sure what Campbell called that in the Hero’s Journey, but that’s where you’re getting feedback from the world that you’re on the right track. You’re headed for the corporate job, you’re making the multiple thousands of dollars a year, you’re driving the nice car, you’ve got the pretty girlfriend, whatever, but it feels hollow.

[00:39:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:39:45] January: It feels totally empty, if that’s not meant to be your life. I suppose there do exist people for whom that is the ideal life, and that’s where they’re supposed to be. Whatever, there’s room for everybody. That human must exist somewhere. I don’t know that person. I am not that person. But that’s the False Validation of Social Success, where the world is telling you that you’re doing great, but the feeling inside you is none of this is making me happy. None of this means anything. None of this is contributing to the world. And a lot of times we can really lose track of that signal that none of it’s actually satisfying, when the world is giving us that success story loudly enough.

But eventually, if we’re lucky, it turns into the Awakening to the Emptiness of Perpetual Doing, where we realize that nothing we’re doing in our lives is actually leading to aliveness, that it’s all just going through the motions trying to check off boxes, that we’re living to some list that somebody else handed us and it has nothing to do with who we are or what we love. That is that moment where, you know, St. John of the Cross would’ve called it the Dark Night of the Soul. Campbell and Murdock both call it the Initiation and Descent. I added that phrase to the Ground of All Being, because that to me is God. It’s the coming home to reality out of the illusion.

And boy, it is not a comfortable process, at all! But we have to start there before we can start the redemptive arc of the journey.

So once we’ve got that foundation, once we’re firmly grounded in something real, then we start to experience that Yearning to Reconnect with Our Being that we’ve sacrificed for the sake of worldly achievement. We start to remember, oh, I loved this thing as a kid. I wonder what would happen if I picked up painting again, or if I went back to figure skating at 50 years old, or whatever. Reclaiming those things that are really our soul speaking to us, those longings that have been inside us all along and we just learned to tune them out.

The next step after that is that we have to Heal Our Broken Trust in Our Being ‘cause when we split, there are parts of us who learned that it wasn’t okay to be in touch with our Being. I mean, we have a whole world out there telling us it’s not okay to rest, it’s not okay to prioritize play, it’s not okay to just do what you love if it’s not gonna make you a bigger paycheck. And so we have to find ways to restore that trust that it’s okay to just be. And sometimes that can take a while.

After that, we get to the Healing of Our Wounded Doing, which is a thing that I’ll talk about a lot, especially when we get to the Mary episode. Because again, we’re not after a world where we just abandon our Doing. We’re not after a world where we’re sitting around waiting for life to happen to us. We’re not trying to be passive recipients of existence. We are receiving what reality wants to give us, and then we’re going and doing something with it. We’re making something out of it, right? That’s the point where things get creative. Something new is coming into Being through us as a result of what we’ve received.

And so that’s where we get to that Integration of the Balance Between Our Being and Doing. We are supposed to slow down and receive ourselves. And then we take that and we go and do something with it. It’s a dynamic interplay. They balance each other. We don’t want too much of one or too much of the other, but we live in a world that has completely exiled one half of that experience and says, only Doing has any value.

And it’s a cycle, right? We spin around this circle constantly, as humans. You might be at a different stage of this cycle in different areas of your life at any given moment. It’s not a one and done thing either. We don’t get to that integration and then go, “Oh, I’m good for life. Now I can start living and everything is fine.”

No, you’re gonna end up separating from yourself again, and you’re gonna have to go around in a circle again. But the more that we do this, and the more that we practice it — first of all, it happens faster. We catch on faster when we’ve split and we’re able to come back to ourselves faster, which is really helpful.

But then also, the time that it takes us to go around the cycle gets shorter and shorter. And so it’s not as much of a disruption to our lives when a massive change lands or when we catch ourselves falling out of it. Like, “Oh yeah. Yep. I know how this goes. Yep. I know that I can trust this process. Yep. I know that I can come back around, that there is something after this, that I’m not just stuck in a hole for the rest of my life.”

So. That’s how I would articulate the Creative Journey.

[00:44:19] Andrew: Awesome.

[00:44:21] Andrew: There’s 10 moments. It moves in a circle like a clock. There’s a top and a bottom, and there’s four movements that move down along the right. And there’s four that move up along the left.

Now starting with the top moment and the bottom moment together, we’ve got Separation from Our Being, and Descent to the Ground of All Being.

[00:44:43] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:44] Andrew: What do you wanna say about Being, January?

[00:44:48] January: I wanna say that I believe pretty firmly at this moment in my life — and this could change any time, but this is where I’m at right now. I believe pretty firmly that relationship is the foundation of everything. Everything. And in terms of the specific way that humans exist in our embodied form on planet Earth at this moment in history, Being has to come first or there’s no us to be in relationship with. If our Being has been exiled, then so has the relationship by definition, and that is profoundly where I think that everything goes wrong. That is where I think humans fell.

[00:45:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:45:29] January: It wasn’t what we were trying to do. It wasn’t a moral failing, but it was a moment where we were no longer in the room to be in relationship with. An objective was in our place instead.

[00:45:42] Andrew: Worse than a broken relationship, it was the broken capacity for relationship.

[00:45:49] January: Yeah. Yeah. Because if it’s just that the relationship has been broken, if it’s just that the trust has been broken, but you’re both still in the room, repair is always on the table. But if your very Being has been exiled, what is there to repair? There’s only one person there.

[00:46:07] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:10] January: And fortunately, God is the one who is always in the room, right? So the minute that we come home to that Being, that relationship is on the table again. ‘Cause there’s never a moment that God abandons us. There’s never a moment where we are left alone in all of this. We can feel alone, Lord knows. We’re real good at that game.

[00:46:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:46:30] January: But the reality is that God is always there, and if I haven’t said this explicitly, I believe that God is reality itself, and I don’t mean our physical universe. I mean whatever it was that the physical universe came into being within. So it’s not that God is some entity who is external to our world and inflicting things on it, but that God is the reality within which we all live and move and have our being.

[00:46:55] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:46:56] January: We are inside God at all times. So there’s literally no way to be anywhere else but in relationship to God. And so the idea that we’re not in relationship is an illusion on our part. It’s a story that we’re telling ourselves, and it is a painful story when we buy into it, when we feel alone like that, it’s crushing. It causes pain, and that’s real. That is a real experience, and I’m not trying to diminish it!

But it’s an illusion, and we’re hurting ourselves with it. And then we’re hurting each other because we’re hurting.

[00:47:30] Andrew: Because to be is necessarily to be in relationship to God. And so if you’re not in relationship to God, you’re not Being.

[00:47:38] January: And if you’re not in relationship to yourself, you’re not Being.

[00:47:42] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:47:42] January: Because if what God wants most is the subjectivity of all creation, right? Not just us, but including everything, then I just think that that changes the entire interpretation of theology. That if we start from an assumption that God is trying to replace our Being with God’s Being or with God’s ideas about who we’re supposed to be, that is colonization.

[00:48:05] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:05] January: Why would we say yes to that? Of course, you’re trying to not let that happen.

[00:48:10] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:11] January: But as our mimetic theologians keep saying, God is the one who is formed in us without displacing us.

[00:48:18] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:18] January: God is already inside us. God is the core of our being. Then

[00:48:24] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:25] January: stepping into that identity and becoming the uniqueness of ourselves is a movement toward God and into that relationship, as opposed to a movement out of it. Even when it might look like, like Mary, we’re not following the rules correctly.

[00:48:43] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:48:43] January: Right?

[00:48:44] Andrew: Part of pairing the top moment with the bottom moment on this circle for me was, the Descent to the Ground of All Being. Through that phrase, I started thinking, does the separation feel like a floating away or like a drifting? If a descent is down, am I right to infer a floating off in the separation? I don’t know if it’s a very meaningful thought or not but floating away isn’t very far from disembodiment.

[00:49:14] January: It’s usually a kind of feeling disembodied and outside of our own heads. And, Lord knows, I’m good at that! I’m real good at that game.

[00:49:22] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:49:23] January: I like being in my head. I like playing with ideas. That is a happy place for me. And I don’t think that I’m being asked to give that up, but I’m being asked to do it at the same time that I am aware of my body and aware of my experience and in touch with my own existence in some fundamental way.

The other thing that comes to mind, and other people might have a different experience of this, but I suspect that a lot of people don’t, just my experience of using tech and especially my phone, right? That when I am looking for information on that device, I have objectified something in a big way. I am not in my body. I don’t know what my fingers are doing. I don’t know what I’m feeling in response to what I’m reading on that screen. I don’t even exist in that. I’m just a mind consuming information and that’s it.

I’ve struggled for a while now with my relationship to tech, but that is a particular thing that I’m adding to the layer right now of, okay, but if this is really costing me my Being on a regular basis, do I really wanna be doing this as much as I’m doing this?

[00:50:24] Andrew: Wow.

[00:50:25] January: And it seems like no big deal, right? It’s five minutes. Who cares? I can just look that thing up and then it’s fine and yeah, okay.

[00:50:33] Andrew: Yeah.

[00:50:34] January: But what am I practicing? Am I practicing being in my Being or am I practicing objectifying things?

[00:50:42] Andrew: Yeah, I have a worse than novice understanding of the multiverse; apparently, physicists actually believe this stuff? I’ve just seen a handful of Marvel movies. I mean, I did study physics in college, but we didn’t get to multiverses.

It did occur to me one day, I was just imagining, well, does that mean if the multiverse is true and every possibility of every possible world is out there, everything everywhere, always at once or whatever that movie was. What if there’s a place where everybody is still themselves but instead of staring at their phone, they’re just staring at a wood block and meditating?

And it just was totally acceptable that everybody was just using this as a focal point to practice some sort of meditative thing. How absurdly ridiculous would that be if people spent that much time, that much time doing that? And then you’re like, oh wait, what are we doing?

[00:51:33] Andrew: No. I wanna give people a mental image of this circle that we’re moving around. There’s 10 moments. Moment 1 at the top, moment 6 at the bottom. As we’re moving down the right side, there’s 2, 3, 4, and 5. Now, moment 2 has two parts.

There’s Identification with Doing and there’s Gathering of Allies. Why might we put these together, do you think?

[00:52:00] January: That’s definitely one of those questions that my answer is likely to evolve over time. So I’m going to give you an answer, that’s my answer right now in this minute, and it will probably be different tomorrow, and it will probably be different next week. And just assuming that all of that is going to continue to develop.

I touched a little bit on this earlier when I was talking about other things, but I think one of the things that happens that causes us to over identify with our Doing is that shame-based identity. That feeling of I’m not okay. That feeling of I’m not enough. That feeling of lack. That sense of something is missing, something is absent, I’m not enough. And that creates a deep insecurity in us.

When we’re fully in our Being, we’re just not, well, I’ll speak for myself. I’m not worried about that shit. I’m not worried about what other people will think of me because I trust my belovedness. I trust I’m okay with God. I’m okay with reality itself. When I’m in my Being, I know that. Not just intellectually, but my body knows it. And that is a sturdy place to stand. So when we’re out of touch with our being and we don’t have access to that sense of okayness, everything feels unstable. It feels shifty. We’re looking for anything to cling onto.

And that’s where I think the Gathering of Allies comes in. We need help to know that we’re okay. We need somebody else to reflect back to us that we are okay, that we’re allowed. So that’s where the whole self-justification thing comes in for me. I think the picture that I picked up from — not even necessarily from church, but just from popular culture talking about churches — is that self-justification is this conviction that we are right and that we need to browbeat other people into also believing that.

And I think on the contrary actually, it’s a deep, deep conviction that we’re wrong. And we’re terrified of that. And so we’re trying to get other people to tell us that we’re wrong about how wrong we feel, basically. And none of this is happening at a conscious level, right? Like I don’t, I don’t think that anybody who was experiencing this, if you asked them is this what’s going on for you, would necessarily be able to say, oh yes, I recognize myself in that.

I know that I wouldn’t. But in retrospect, years later, I can see that that’s, that’s what was going on for me under the surface, was that I had a deep sense of not okayness and I was trying to recruit other people to my cause in order to feel more stable within myself because I lacked that stability of my own being.

[00:54:39] Andrew: Yeah, I think an understanding of mimesis and a formation of desire can be very helpful here. It’s often presented as, “Oh, where does the desire in me come from?” Like, “Oh, well, there’s another, and I see that desire, and it can take it as good, and I follow it and it becomes desirable because I see it in the other.” And that’s there.

But the Gathering of Allies is more the inverse, of like, I need somebody to see me as their model right now. I’m doing this thing,

[00:55:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:06] Andrew: and I need them to see it as desirable. Whether they can do it worse than me or better than me. Just that by their mimetic attachment to me, I can gain a sense of self, and it validates my Doing.

Yeah. I do think mimesis offers us an understanding of why an identification through Doing would necessarily involve other people, getting other people alongside.

[00:55:28] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:29] Andrew: It’s definitely there. I was just curious if mimesis was in your head when those two things came together or not?

[00:55:34] January: It wasn’t initially ‘cause I hadn’t heard of it

[00:55:36] Andrew: Oh.

[00:55:36] January: at the point when I first started thinking of it. But it was definitely one of the reasons that the whole mimetic phenomenon just nailed it for me. I was immediately like, “Yes, I see this everywhere.” And this was one of the places where I was like, “Yes, that’s the word for what’s going on there.”

[00:55:53] Andrew: Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now, moment 3, as we’re working across the circle. Big title: Road of Trials, subtitle: the Blessing of Obstacles.

[00:56:02] January: Mm mm-hmm.

[00:56:03] Andrew: How are obstacles a blessing?

[00:56:08] January: So this comes back to what I feel like is the important practice of this episode, and that is that obstacles give us an opportunity to pause.

It’s a place where the universe has stuck something in our path to slow us down. And if we’re in objectification mode, we’re fucking pissed about that, right? Like, I don’t need shit slowing me down. I’m trying to get over there. I’ve got a thing in mind. Maybe I’ve got a deadline that I’m running to, this is just an inconvenience. Get it the fuck outta my way so I can go do the thing, right? And it’s, it’s not a pleasant experience, it just irritates us.

But if we can accept the invitation, if we can realize that that’s what is happening, and kind of slow ourselves down and go, “Oh, oh, this is an opportunity to connect with my Being. Is this objective that I’m after actually something that my Being wants? Or is it something that I have internalized from culture and am pursuing because other people think that it will bring me prestige?”

I have really learned to reframe those moments as blessings and opportunities rather than obstacles. It’s a chance to reality check myself and come home to my experience and say, “Okay, do I really need to be doing this right now? Do I really want to be doing this right now?” Which is always a trick question with me, ‘cause it’s so hard to know what I want.

But yeah, the practice of that pause. And that’s another thing that mindfulness trainers will talk about all the time is putting a pause between the impulse and the action. Can you slow down just enough

[00:57:40] Andrew: Hmm.

[00:57:41] January: that you’re able to choose your actions instead of being driven to them? Does that make sense?

[00:57:47] Andrew: Oh yeah. I mean, one of the biggest helpers I had to quit smoking was, somebody was like, “Just don’t smoke for the next 10 minutes.” That’s it.

[00:57:55] January: Mm.

[00:57:56] Andrew: The next 10 minutes. Anybody, no matter how many packs a day you smoke, anybody can go 10 minutes without a cigarette.

[00:58:03] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:03] Andrew: And you know what? There’s no nicotine fit that’s gonna last longer than 10 minutes, at least not for me.

[00:58:10] January: Oh, interesting.

[00:58:11] Andrew: I heard that and maybe they just told me that lie and I believed it.

[00:58:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:14] Andrew: I mean, it comes back the nicotine fits don’t just. Oh, it’s gone. They come back and they’re worse. And the headaches, they stay longer than 10 minutes. There’s lots of stuff that’s awful. But the fit, the urge, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I believed at the time was that the actual urge can’t stick around for 10 minutes.

And so you just, you just quit 10 minutes at a time. It didn’t actually work, but anyway, it’s a funny story.

So yes, thank you so much. Because my thought about this like, oh, Road of Trials, the Blessing of Obstacles. Like I was totally just thinking sarcastically. I’m like, oh yeah, of course, they’re so great. And I’m ready to point out do —

[00:58:51] January: which is how we experience that, right? Like, this is fucking bullshit.

[00:58:54] Andrew: Yeah. Like the goodness — of course there’s giant scare quotes around “goodness” — of obstacles. Now it can be carried to a vicious extreme.

[00:59:03] January: Yes, absolutely.

[00:59:05] Andrew: And there’s some of us, and I think the Gospels are one of the us here, call that extreme scandal, where you have to overcome the thing in order to be who you are. So much so that even after you’ve overcome it, you’re carrying the obstacle with you, ‘cause you can’t be without it. You always have to be overcoming.

And if it’s not there to overcome, then what are you, who are you? And when you’re bringing your enemy with you, so you can always fight your enemy, that’s what Girard anyway refers to as scandal. So yes, this Blessing of Obstacles certainly can be carried too far. And so I was just seeing the road to this extreme that’s awful. But thank you for removing the scare quotes from goodness and reminding me that like there can be a goodness to an obstacle if you just let it be an obstacle,

[00:59:51] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:51] Andrew: and not your sense of identity. Just let it be the thing

[00:59:54] January: Yeah.

[00:59:54] Andrew: that stops you for a moment and maybe

[00:59:57] January: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:58] Andrew: you don’t have to overcome it.

[01:00:00] January: Yeah.

[01:00:00] Andrew: Like, maybe it just stops you and then it can be a good thing.

[01:00:04] January: Yeah. And maybe it doesn’t stop you, maybe you end up choosing to do the same thing, but you’re choosing to do it from that place of Being, from that place of relationship.

[01:00:13] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:00:13] January: Right? That’s a whole different action.

[01:00:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:00:17] Andrew: Moment 4, the False Validation of Social Success. Now, we’re following really close to Maureen Murdock here, and I did like Illusory Boon of Success. I just, that was a great phrase. But by your phrasing, the False Validation of Social Success, I picked up there’s sort of a two-parter here in the same way that moment 2 had two parts: Identification with Doing, Gathering of Allies.

By adding social to our understanding of success, the identification with Doing, on the one hand, that could just be, it feels good to get stuff done. Yeah, I did that, did that, got my to-do list. Check, check, check, check, check.

But the Gathering of Allies, in addition to Identification with Doing, it points to the fact that if you’re really getting stuff done, if it’s really success, it’s ‘cause it’s success in the eyes of other people, right?

[01:01:10] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:10] Andrew: You don’t actually feel that good about a to-do list with all the check marks.

[01:01:15] January: Right.

[01:01:16] Andrew: It’s a social phenomenon here, this success. And so even though I did like the phrasing Illusory Boon of Success, I was like, oh, why did we lose those words? The addition of ‘Social’ there to our understanding of what success passes as seemed really important to me.

[01:01:32] January: Yeah. And again, I was putting it together before I had encountered Girard’s work. But, yeah, it is specifically, I would say, the pursuit of prestige. Because like you said, checking off all of the boxes, if that’s not coming from our Being, if that’s not coming from our genuine desires given to us by God, that’s just gonna feel exhausting.

We’re gonna have a momentary hit of dopamine from our brains ‘cause we got to check the box off, but it’s not going to feel good. The experience is not going to feel good in our bodies. It’s just gonna be like, “Oh God.” Then there’s another checkbox to check off and the list just never ends.

And how many of us are living our lives that way? Right? The weight of the world feels exhausting to so many of us because we’re trying to live to that mental checklist, which is all about what other people think we should be doing. It’s not about what we think we should be doing because we are not in the room. We are not in our Being.

[01:02:34] Andrew: Wow. Yeah.

[01:02:37] Andrew: Now, moment 5, which brings us right up against the Descent to the Ground of All Being, is awakening. Awakening to the Emptiness of Perpetual Doing. We are in our podcast going to be talking about practices, right? We’re gonna be giving people ideas of things that they can do

[01:02:59] January: Mmmm.

[01:02:59] Andrew: and I guess I’m curious — now, I’m gonna ask you specifically about moment 5, but guess what? It’s gonna be about all 10 moments in just a second — can waking, can that be a practice? And of course, I’m not talking about literally waking up in the morning. God knows, I don’t, I don’t practice that. Or maybe I do, I don’t know. But anyway, in the metaphorical sense that we’re using it here. Can we practice waking?

[01:03:21] January: This is one of those moments where I’m not gonna say no, we can’t practice waking up, because I’m reluctant to ever say anything is impossible. But what I see here — speaking to the larger practice that I want to emphasize in this episode — that what we practice doing is making space for that experience. That that is an experience that God gives to us. It is a gift to receive. It’s not something to achieve. It’s not a box to check off.

And so what we can do is we cannot control the neurons connecting in our brains. We cannot force ourselves into insight. We can only make space and create conditions for insight to happen, and then we have to hope that it will and pray that it will.

And so yeah, the Awakening to the Emptiness of our Doing is an incredibly painful process for a lot of us, especially in the West, because we’re so involved in the Doing and we’re so involved in the striving. And again, speaking for myself, God had to go real fucking hard to get through to me.

Literally my front door had to be kicked in by police officers for me to be stopped in my tracks and for me to realize oh shit, nothing I’m doing is actually — I was getting hints of it obviously before then. I knew that my life wasn’t working for me. I knew that I felt miserable. I knew that I was doing all of these things to numb out, but I didn’t know that anything else was possible. I thought that was all there was.

And so yeah, God had to send a squad of Homeland Security detectives to rescue me from my Doing. I don’t recommend that.

I, I really don’t. But it was funny that even at the time I was like, this is a rescue. This is a painful thing that I’m going through. I hate everything about it.

[01:05:10] Andrew: Mm-hmm.

[01:05:11] January: I do not like it. It is not gentle. But the reason that it is not gentle is not because God is not gentle. It’s because I fucking was putting all of the barriers in the way. I was blowing through all of the obstacles that I was offered that would’ve slowed me down before this point.

And so God had to go real fucking hard to get through to me ‘cause I had constructed this life around myself that wasn’t mine. So what we can do is we can practice things that slow us down. We can practice things that make more spaciousness for that encounter to happen, for us to discover the me I haven’t met yet, if you will.

[01:05:48] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:05:49] January: That doesn’t guarantee anything. It is not a thing to achieve. But my experience very much is that if you make that space, something will emerge out of the earth and grow. You can trust that process, and you can trust that process ‘cause you can see it happening in nature, in the physical world, everywhere around you. It’s obvious that this is what happens and it happens inside us as well as outside us.

[01:06:14] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:06:15] Andrew: Would it be too lackadaisical or, or lazy, just outright lazy to say — and here I’m talking about all ten moments around this circle, right? — “Oh, these aren’t the types of undertakings we can practice or dress rehearse, or, no, we can only go so far as preparing ourselves to not be surprised when they come along.”

[01:06:35] January: Hmm.

[01:06:35] Andrew: Does that fall short of what we can do? Because it sounds like you’re saying a bit more than we can prepare ourselves for when they come along.

But you’re saying maybe we can’t wake ourselves up, but we can make space, we can make room for the possibility in a way of like, can we ask ourselves, am I sleeping right now?

[01:06:51] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:06:52] Andrew: Can I ask that question seriously? Am I sleeping on something right now, or when have I?

Does it stop short if you start thinking of these moments as things that, well, they’ll come when they come and maybe I can do my best not to be surprised ‘cause I’ve got a map now, but they just come when they come and I can’t practice them.

Is that stopping short of what we can do?

[01:07:13] January: I do think that that’s stopping short of what we can do. In the way that you just phrased that, there’s some sense for me that we’ve objectified something, again, we’ve made it an object. That like, okay, we’ve taken achievement out of the equation temporarily, but it’s still a thing rather than an experience.

And so there are tools of self-reflection. There are questions that we can ask ourselves and maybe the questions alone aren’t always enough. Usually, those questions have come to us from outside us, like we looked up a list of journaling questions or something, right?

They came from somewhere else and then caused us to reflect in a way that we hadn’t thought about that thing before. So that is a way that the Other comes to us and is in relationship with us. But I think also questions like, “What am I trying not to feel right now?” Right? There are questions that shine the light on what we are avoiding in our internal landscapes.

And those questions, there might be a limited degree to which we can answer them honestly. There might be way more in me that I’m avoiding than I have any awareness of whatsoever. But every tiny millimeter that I move toward those questions and toward that shadow and get curious about what is it that I don’t know in my own landscape, the more that that sheds light on that inner landscape. And things will reveal themselves to us if we can step into that curiosity.

[01:08:44] Andrew: Yeah. No, thank you for telling me that it feels like what I’m doing is making space for objectification of the Self.

[01:08:52] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:08:53] Andrew: Because when you said that, just instantly was like, oh yeah, I am. What I’m doing is I’m changing the title of this thing, and I’m trying to make it something that it’s not. It’s the Creative’s Journey.

[01:09:04] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:05] Andrew: It’s not an evolution, the creative’s evolution of like, oh, this will the creative’s growth patterns, or what? It’s, it’s an actual journey, like there’s a clear implication of subjectivity in the choice of your title here, the Creative’s Journey, which, yeah. Don’t wanna lose that.

[01:09:21] January: It is an experience to have, not an outcome to achieve.

Yeah, something that my pastor says constantly is that Christianity is not a self-improvement project. And I’m like, yes. I think that he thinks I’m turning it into one a lot, which is often where that comes up, but I’m like, that’s not, that’s not what I’m talking about, but it’s okay.

[01:09:44] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Well,

cool.

Initiation.

[01:09:48] January: Mm mm-hmm.

[01:09:50] Andrew: How is the Descent to Ground of All Being — how is this descent an initiation? Is it ‘cause it’s a circle and you can start anywhere? Or is there something new starting here. What’s inside the word initiation?

[01:10:04] January: Oh my God, so much. Wow. Thank you for asking that question, that just, um, yeah.

So to come back to something I said a minute ago, I think that that is the moment where we realize that there is an us we haven’t met yet, which I’m pretty sure is an Andre Rabe phrase that I just sort of automatically appropriated because it was so obviously — yes!

It is a moment of becoming or when becoming becomes possible because we’ve seen it, finally. We’ve had the insight that something has opened up.

And on the flip side of that, right, to bring it back to the theme of the podcast, it is also a death. It’s a death of the person we were previously. There’s a threshold beyond which we cannot go back.

[01:10:56] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:10:57] January: So it is an initiation into something new, but it is also a point of no return to what we were before. At least not in the same form. We do, in any spiritual journey, come home to where we started. But coming home to where we started is not the same thing as never having left.

[01:11:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:11:16] January: We are changed by the experience of the journey.

[01:11:19] Andrew: With that word initiation, part of me is thinking pledge week in some university that I never went to, but, you know, saw movies about.

[01:11:26] January: Uh-huh!

[01:11:27] Andrew: Is that the kind of thing we’re thinking of?

[01:11:29] January: Pledge week is definitely not the kind of thing we’re thinking of, although it certainly is an initiation!

But, uh, rather than pledge week, we’re talking more like shamanic traditions. Every tradition is different and every culture has different ways of going about it, but there is always some kind of ceremonial loss of identity. They do something, or you get dumped into some situation that does it for you, but there’s a stripping of the identity.

It’s a marker of this is the thing that’s gonna cease to be. And from here on out, you’re gonna get to be something new, but you’re gonna have to go through some stuff to get to the new as well. And that’s also part of the initiation.

So the way that I’m conceiving of it specifically in terms of the Creative Journey is it’s a re-encountering of one’s vulnerability. That if all of this started with Eve exiling her vulnerability, kicking that to the curb, trying to cover it up, exiling it from her experience, initiation is the moment where we go, “Oh shit, that’s still there!”

And now we have to find a way to be in relationship to it. We can’t keep exiling it anymore. And so a lot of people will talk about it in terms of developing a relationship with a higher power, whatever that higher power is for you. Connecting to something that is bigger than yourself because the small ‘s’ self is gonna have to die to go through this process of becoming something new.

And if you’re not connected to something bigger than yourself when that happens, you just implode as a person. You don’t make it through the initiation. You don’t make it to the redemptive half of the Journey.

Once they’ve descended to the ground of all Being, they have more access to their own Being. Some of that relationship has been restored. And so then, because they’re more firmly in their own Being, there’s more of them to be in relationship with God. There’s more of them to be in relationship with their community and their people.

And I really wish that we could start cultivating liturgy that had some kind of collective ritual around this, some kind of rite to celebrate when we’ve moved from one stage to another. Because if you’re going through all of this stuff on your own, and lots of people do, if you don’t have a community to say, “Yes, we recognize that you have left this stage and entered this stage,” it just gets experienced as trauma.

[01:13:49] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:13:50] January: Right? You’re just left alone in it.

[01:13:52] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:13:52] January: And that’s one of the reasons, I’m sure there are many reasons, but that’s one of the reasons that so many people never make it to the redemptive half of that cycle is that nobody is reflecting back to them that, yes, this is real. This thing that you went through happened, and it changed you in these ways, and we can see that. And so we just get stuck.

[01:14:10] Andrew: Is there a corollary or a positive version, perhaps, of gathering allies that can attend an initiation or is it always a solitary occasion?

[01:14:22] January: I think there are people who can be witnesses. But ultimately, every single one of us is alone before God. So there is a critical part of this that has to be gone through alone because there is nobody else who can get inside our heads and be there with us. It’s an internal journey

[01:14:40] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:14:41] January: as much as, possibly more than, an external one.

[01:14:44] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:14:45] January: And nobody else can go on that with us. They can be alongside us. They can’t do it with us.

[01:14:52] Andrew: Yeah. I’ve been listening to a lot of Robert Falconer YouTube stuff, so that’s gonna come out later here in a few of my questions.

[01:14:59] January: Excellent.

[01:15:00] Andrew: He drew a line between catharsis and witnessing, and he said, with regards to psychiatric work and helping people work through trauma, the goal is not catharsis. And there can be breakthrough moments and stuff.

They can seem similar, but they’re not. They’re completely different.

[01:15:15] January: Yeah.

[01:15:16] Andrew: And I think with Girard’s understanding of the archaic sacred it is heavy with catharsis. That’s what

[01:15:22] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:23] Andrew: they’re holding onto. Here’s a chance for all of us to get together and “Rawr!” at the same time, or “Oowh!” at the same time. But for that to happen, you need a show.

[01:15:33] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:15:33] Andrew: And if you’re witnessing, right? If you’re the centurion standing there at the end of Mark and be like, “Oh, this, this was the son of God!” That’s not a cathartic event for him. That’s him

[01:15:45] January: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:15:46] Andrew: taking in what happened.

So anyway, when you used the word witness, then it got me thinking about, oh yeah, I heard. That, in an initiation, as you put it a ceremonial loss of identity, yeah, that there will be witnesses there, but it is a solitary occasion.

It’d be kind of like any ceremony, like at a wedding. Oh, is that something that the couple does by themselves, or does

[01:16:06] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:06] Andrew: everybody get involved and like, well...

[01:16:08] January: Exactly.

[01:16:10] Andrew: It is very much about the community. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a clear distinction in a ceremony about who’s having stuff happen, who’s undergoing the transformation and who’s witnessing the transformation.

[01:16:23] January: Yeah.

[01:16:23] Andrew: Yeah. Although, I will say it, oftentimes it seems like, and I’m not enough of a biblical scholar to say this stuff off the top of my head, but at least a few times in Acts, when people get baptized, it’s like, so and so and their whole family, you know?

And the baptism is very much an initiation, and it represents a death and a resurrection. Maybe that’s natural, that’s a mimetic thing going on that

[01:16:46] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:16:46] Andrew: when the people you know and are close to, and their interior world is changing, our minds are porous. That stuff’s gonna seep through if they’re close to us.

But thank you for helping me with the initiation. Yeah, I, I was pretty sure that like, I know we’re not talking about Pledge Week. That’s just—

[01:17:01] January: No, it was a great comparison. Right? That’s an image that people are very familiar with. It helps to make the contrast.

[01:17:07] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:08] January: Pledge Week uses all of the same elements. We’re going to humiliate you to break down your previous identity. We’re going to give you this new group identity, but it’s all,

[01:17:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:17:18] January: it’s all based on not being that guy, right?

[01:17:21] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:22] January: It’s all togetherness at somebody else’s

expense.

[01:17:25] Andrew: Okay, we’re gonna head back up the left side of this circle. And so moment 7, the first part of the upswing here, reads Urgent Yearning to Reconnect with Our Being.

Now we’re sitting pretty high up, right? Like at 10,000 feet. We see it all. Reconnect with Being—of course! It’s Being, that’s what we want. We’re gonna reconnect to it. You can see it up there at the top. We separated from it in moment 1. Here we are in moment 7, but what if you’re in moment 7 not looking down at the whole circle from above? The yearning there

[01:18:03] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:04] Andrew: that’s felt, and it is urgent, right? Do you really know that it’s Being you’re after?

[01:18:13] January: Hmm.

[01:18:14] Andrew: Might a total ignorance of what you’re yearning for, make this feel more like dissatisfaction or maybe even

[01:18:22] January: Oh, yeah.

[01:18:23] Andrew: disgust at what you’re doing, or is it too negative? Because this is the left side, the upswing of the Creative Journey. Is that too negative of a framing for this moment?

[01:18:34] January: No, I really appreciate that you’re bringing that up because obviously that’s not what it looks like for Mary because she never left her Being, but for those of us who have done that and have to find our way back, the image that I always think of is a snake that’s shedding its skin, where the life that you’re in just feels tighter and tighter and tighter and you know that you have to get out of it, but you don’t necessarily know where you’re going or what you’re gonna move toward, or even why it feels terrible necessarily.

I mean, this is why I’m a coach. ‘Cause people need help figuring these things out! We don’t know a lot of the time. And so yeah, there’s a growing sense of this gnawing hunger in our soul, but we don’t know what we’re hungry for. We don’t even necessarily know that we’re hungry sometimes. We just know that the life that we’re in doesn’t fit and we’ve gotta do something about it.

It’s becoming unsustainable to not do something about it. And that’s part of that initiation phase of seeing through the illusion, right? Like, you’ve seen that your life is not working for you anymore, and once you’ve seen that, you can’t stay in it. Or at least the stay in it is temporary.

Something Martha Beck likes to say is stay in it as long as you can. Stay in it as long as you can stand to do so. Don’t try to — this is something that I personally have problems with — Julia Cameron calls it raising the jumps. Once you’ve seen that a change is necessary there can be an impulse to throw yourself all the way over it.

You don’t have to do that. It can often be much more uncomfortable when you do do that. You can just be patient and let the change unfold in its own time. But many, many, many of us will just try to dive into the change because the life that we’re in feels so unsustainable suddenly. And so yeah, it’s absolutely not necessarily a comfortable place.

It’s not necessarily not a comfortable place. There are people who the illusion falls away and they’re just like, oh, this is what I wanted the whole time, and they just go for it. Great. That person exists. That is a real experience. I would celebrate that that was the least traumatic option possible. Wonderful.

[01:20:41] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:20:42] January: And there’s this other version where the resurrection is not a happy ending. It’s a terrifying beginning. It’s a terrifying beginning.

[01:20:51] Andrew: Yeah. Yes. Okay. That’s moment 7.

[01:20:55] Andrew: Moving up to moments 8 and 9, Healing Our Broken Trust in Our Being, Healing Our Wounded Doing. So obviously healing is a part of both of these moments and healing can be tricky.

[01:21:13] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:14] Andrew: And, and I don’t mean the experience, as tricky as that might be, but I mean, the word

[01:21:19] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:19] Andrew: healing

[01:21:20] January: Yes.

[01:21:21] Andrew: can be a little tricky because when we talk about healing, it’s easy enough to get an image of what is going on.

[01:21:27] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:27] Andrew: Energy is at work. There’s a body, some vector pointed toward health. Yep, yep, yep. All that is the what, but who is doing the what? Is—

[01:21:42] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:42] Andrew: and I may have sort of already asked this question in a different form about some of the earlier moments, but this is about Being and Doing. Is healing an action the creative undertakes, or is it an event she undergoes?

[01:21:58] January: The answer is yes.

[01:22:02] Andrew: Oh, okay. I like that answer.

[01:22:05] January: Um, it is not something that we do in ourselves. We don’t know how to knit ourselves back together. We do not know how to connect our neural pathways. We do not know how to repair our cells when they’re damaged. We can’t do those things. We have to wait for those things to happen. That is God’s work in us. It is not our effort that makes it happen.

What we can do is participate in the process. Or more specifically, we can not inhibit the process.

[01:22:37] Andrew: Okay. Yeah.

[01:22:38] January: We can do things like make sure that we’re getting enough water, make sure that we’re getting enough sleep, make sure that we’re getting enough healthy foods, make sure that we have enough social connection, and those things will all contribute to the healing, but they’re not the cause of the healing. That’s just our body doing its thing.

That process will unfold in us as long as we don’t get in the way of it. That is God at work in the systems of the world, in the fabric of reality. The whole system will move toward health if we don’t keep fucking it up. We’re just really good at continually fucking it up.

[01:23:17] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:23:18] January: So we can slow the process down, but we can’t speed it up.

[01:23:21] Andrew: I’m calling the steps around in this journey. I’ve been calling them moments, and in a way, I think I was drawn to use the word moment just because there’s a certain ambiguity with a moment. Is it something you do or is it something that happens to you?

[01:23:34] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:34] Andrew: Whereas steps, it implies you gotta be the doer. I’ve been thinking of this circle as two sides. We’ve got the top and the bottom, Moment 1 and 6, and then along the right side, would those be more things that we do, identifying with others, gathering allies, road of trials, the false validation, the awakening?

Are those more doing whereas these others are more done unto us, receiving? Or is it just a little more messy than that and any of these moments could be either.

[01:24:04] January: I think humans in general are messy, so I don’t think that putting anything into an either-or category is ever the right way to go when we’re talking about people.

[01:24:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:15] January: And, especially when we’re talking about God. God can interrupt the whole process and do whatever the fuck God wants. God is completely free to mess with this process at any point. God is not bound by our ideas about how any of this works.

[01:24:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:30] January: That’s a really important point, right? So yeah, we can be mired in our doing and busy gathering allies and doing everything that we can to control, and grace can still find us, and grace can still break us out because of nothing that we did.

[01:24:45] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:24:45] January: This something to receive, not something to achieve. And it can find us anywhere, and that’s the beauty of it and the gift of it, but what I’m hoping with articulating this process is not so much that we can strive to do it instead of God, because that’s exactly the opposite of the point I’m trying to make.

But that we can participate in what is happening and these are the stages that we can observe happening. And so to have stages like the gathering of allies, to have stages like the road of trials, is not so much a, “Now I have the correct label for what’s happening here!” It’s just a mental flag of, “Uh oh!”

It’s making space for that insight. It has created a moment where I can check myself, I can go, “Oh, oh wait, I know what I’m doing here. How about I pause, how about I slow myself down?” Making room for participation in what God is doing in us because that is the essence of creativity, to me, is that participation.

[01:25:46] Andrew: Yeah. Cool.

[01:25:48] Andrew: Now if healing is a tricky word, so is trust. And moment 8, Healing Our Broken Trust in Our Being. So the same question: where there is trust going on, who is doing what? And trust is doubly tricky, at least for folks like myself raised in the Church. Trust is inextricably bound up with and in faith.

[01:26:18] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:26:19] Andrew: Could we rephrase moment 8 as healing our broken faith? I mean, can faith be broken? We recently heard a definition from Elizabeth Gilbert for faith, and she said, “Faith is relaxing completely in the presence of somebody you know is very fond of you.”

[01:26:41] January: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[01:26:43] Andrew: It’s a beautiful definition. I think it’s spot on. Relaxing. Completely relaxed in the presence of someone. And partly, I think, because you’re in the presence of someone

[01:26:54] January: Yes.

[01:26:55] Andrew: is how you’re relaxing. This someone that you know is fond — not that you think might think, but like it’s so obvious, this person is fond. There’s not any question of whether this person likes you, right? And so, in that situation, that’s when you have faith.

You’re technically, grammatically the subject of the verb ‘relax,’ the person who has the faith, but where’s the action been happening? Where did the ability to relax come from? It’s from the other party that is so clearly expressing their fondness for you.

So, healing our broken faith. Can faith get broken? And if so, is that what gets healed in moment 8 or have I gone down a tangent?

[01:27:39] January: You have not gone down a tangent. This is highly relevant. I don’t know that I can give a responsible, let alone articulate answer to the question of what’s the difference between trust and faith, because honestly, I don’t know. Most of the time when people start talking about faith, I just mentally insert the word trust because I don’t have any connection to that word faith, myself. It’s so bound up in so many things that have been so misused for so many years that it just sort of makes my skin itch.

‘Cause I’m like, I don’t know what you mean when you say that. I can’t make any assumptions about what that word means to you. So, I just use the word trust and that mostly gets me to a place where I can understand what they’re talking about. But you are absolutely correct that faith or trust is something that is created in us by somebody else showing up, in a trustworthy way, over time.

So, I would say that, yes, I do think that faith can get quote-unquote broken in the same way that trust can get broken, in the sense that we feel betrayed by something. Even if that is a story that we’re telling ourselves that isn’t real, right? Eve was not betrayed by God. That did not happen. But her faith in God was broken because of the serpent’s lie.

There’s a great line in one of my favorite fiction books, that was such a light bulb moment for me. Something to the effect of, “Any experience of trauma, no matter how small, can cause a person to misinterpret reality.”

And I just went *pghhhh* mind blown. Because, you know, since I think of God as reality, it was that moment of oh yeah, when we get hurt, the story that we make up is so often not true.

[01:29:31] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:29:31] January: And that gets in the way of our trust. It gets in the way of our faith. I love that you’re calling out questions about the use of the language like healing, and the use of the language like trust, and who’s actually the one doing the work here, because it really isn’t us. We’re participating in it, and we’re making space for it. But the making the space isn’t even a guarantee, necessarily.

If someone is really badly traumatized, they can’t do anything to fix their perception of reality. They need other humans to show up and be trustworthy consistently enough, often enough, that that trust starts to heal in them. And how many people who are that badly wounded actually get that?

[01:30:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:15] January: So few!

[01:30:16] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:17] January: And I really think that this is one of the points where our relationship to God and our relationship to people get so bound up because I have known people for whom it was completely impossible to trust that God was good or that God was loving because the humans in their life had not been good, had not been loving.

[01:30:35] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:30:36] January: And that works the other way too. There are people who manage to never lose their trust in humanity because they have such a deep experience of God’s goodness.

But when that gets inverted, and when we can’t trust God as Father because our father wasn’t a good father, wasn’t a nourishing, wasn’t a caring, wasn’t a whatever, parent, and then that gets in the way of our being able to receive love from someone who is good, who is loving, who is caring, because it doesn’t look like what our idea of love is, or what was taught to us was love was actually abuse, was actually toxic, was actually neglect, whatever.

[01:31:15] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:31:15] January: These things get so complicated and so, yeah, I do wanna be really clear that this framework is just a trellis. It’s not meant to be a cage.

[01:31:24] Andrew: It felt to me like faith can encompass all of what you’re saying in that phrase: healing our broken trust in our Being.

But for me, when I stumble into the phrase healing our broken faith, that’s not one I’ve ever come up with on my own. But where I was raised, and in the religious tradition I was raised, people that presumed the role of teaching the Bible would talk a lot about people who lose their faith.

And it was never you, the student in their class, but it was always somebody else that had lost their faith. And that’s a real phrase. I don’t know that that’s a biblical phrase. If anybody ever lost faith, I’d be interested — I’m gonna go do a word study when this is over and find out, so you know whether to edit this out or not, or leave it in and make me look uninformed. But!

There’s such a huge difference between “Oh, she lost her faith,” or “She needs to heal her broken faith. “I don’t have faith anymore, I lost that” to “My faith is broken.”

[01:32:32] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:32:33] Andrew: Those are complete—

[01:32:34] January: And something broke it! Right? And it wasn’t just like, “Oops, I fucked up and lost it.”

[01:32:40] Andrew: Yeah. It’s not that it’s gone. It’s there, and it’s hurt. And I think that that probably fits theologically with a generally Christian Orthodox understanding of sin and what it does to us. It occludes, it breaks, it perverts. But this idea of something vanishing and it’s gone. It’s not there anymore, and then they’re screwed because they don’t have it, so they can’t be saved. That’s what people who lost their faith, that’s what that picture — But

[01:33:05] January: Yeah.

[01:33:05] Andrew: having a broken faith certainly feels more relatable to me in my own experience.

And I think it, I don’t know if it empowers or not, but it certainly encourages a more healthy framing of my neighbors who do not profess faith. I’m sure it would be insulting for somebody be like, “No, I ain’t got any faith,” and I’m like, “Oh, you got a broken faith.” I’m sure that would come across insulting.

So, I wouldn’t actually try to correct people if they told me they had no faith.

[01:33:29] January: Yeah.

[01:33:30] Andrew: But getting back to Gilbert’s definition, right?

[01:33:33] January: Yeah.

[01:33:34] Andrew: Relaxing completely in the presence of somebody you know is very fond of you.

[01:33:39] January: Yeah.

[01:33:39] Andrew: On that definition, faith could be broken in at least three ways.

Maybe you just can’t relax — just can’t. That sounds like anxiety. Maybe you’re convinced you’re not in the presence of anyone who is fond of you. That sounds like Eve’s story. I think she

[01:33:59] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:33:59] Andrew: What?

[01:34:00] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:34:00] Andrew: God, God’s not giving me good gifts? God has a good gift that, that they’re keeping just for themselves, like the

[01:34:09] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:34:09] Andrew: Can’t relax. Convinced you’re not in the presence of anyone who’s fond of you. Or perhaps the most seriously extreme case would be you’re convinced that you just aren’t the kinda person anyone could be fond of.

[01:34:24] January: Yeah.

[01:34:26] Andrew: That would be a miserable state, but it’s not unimaginable.

[01:34:29] January: That’s where I think Eve is,

[01:34:31] Andrew: You think so?

[01:34:32] January: at the Garden. Yeah. If the only options are, I am lovable or I am unlovable. And we definitely know which one the serpent sees her as. That’s fairly clear from the tone.

[01:34:42] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:34:44] January: And that’s what breaks my heart, because I think that that experience is way, way more common than we want to think. I think there are a lot of people who wouldn’t necessarily articulate that about their experience, but that that is evident from the way that they’re living their lives. Yeah.

[01:35:00] Andrew: The encouraging thing is that all three of those cases of broken faith, it would seem, could be healed by one and the same salve: an encounter with someone who’s just plain fond of you — and convincingly so.

And the presence, because we’re gonna be talking about IFS and I know we’re frontloading all this stuff before we’ve explained it for listeners, but not just to be in the presence of someone who’s just fond of you, but to know that inside you there is a presence that is just fond of whoever else is bouncing around your head.

[01:35:36] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:35:36] Andrew: Like that capital ‘S’ Self that we will talk about. I think it heals broken faith. I think it can.

[01:35:44] January: Yeah.

[01:35:45] Andrew: If it is what I understand it to be. I haven’t actually met it myself, but, uh,

[01:35:49] January: I think that’s an excellent description of exactly what IFS does. Yeah. It heals broken faith through that practice of witnessing.

Yeah. Yeah. It connects directly with something that theologians are starting to talk about a lot more often now, that that word faith in the New Testament often got translated in a way that made it sound like it was our faith that we were bringing to God. But that actually, the better way to understand that word is the faithfulness of Christ coming to us.

And so, in that sense, faith can’t be lost. Because God is never not coming to us.

[01:36:29] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:36:30] January: Christ is never not coming to us. It can’t go anywhere. It’s just there. It’s eternal. It’s a gift. You get to have it. The only thing that can happen to it is that we lose trust in it, that we lose touch with our experience of it, because some other traumatic event has happened to interrupt that connection. And that experience is very, very real for so many people.

And you know, I think if we talked about the loss of faith as a wound, as something that needs healing and needs time and space and care to recover, as opposed to it being some character failing that you just have to like, buckle up and find the bootstraps to pull yourself up by.

[01:37:11] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:37:13] January: You can’t lose Christ just because you’ve lost faith. That’s not a thing.

[01:37:20] Andrew: No.

[01:37:21] January: Just like you’re not gonna lose the people who love you just because you screw up. You might lose respect, you might lose the immediate experience of affection temporarily, ‘cause we’re humans and we’re not perfect about expressing our love. But if that person loves you in the divine sense, if that person is fond of you, like you’re saying, that fondness is what’s running the show, not your behavior.

[01:37:53] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:37:54] January: I’m just as fond of my friends when they do something fucking stupid as I am when they’re being absolutely brilliant.

[01:38:01] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:38:04] Andrew: Um, The Creative’s Journey. Moment 9, Healing Our Wounded Doing. Of course, the ordering here is very important. Yeah. Healing Our Broken Trust in our Being will precede the Healing of Our Wounded Doing. There’s an order here

[01:38:21] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:38:21] Andrew: uh, between Being and Doing, and when the things get disordered between the two, that’s where the problems arise.

So, in the cycle. My question here is, when in the cycle does our Doing get wounded? Does it get hurt and then separate from Being because of the injury? Or is it the separation that comes first and that’s what wounds our Doing. Or — both of those are kind of around moment 1, but what about moment 5?

When we awaken to the emptiness of it all, this emptiness that had just been papered over with false validation and now we see the vanity of our Doing like that, th-that could do a number on your Doing too, I think.

[01:39:10] January: Mm, mm-hmm.

[01:39:11] Andrew: Is there a particular moment in this cycle where you understand the Doing to be hurt or to be wounded?

[01:39:20] January: That is an excellent question/observation, whatever that just was. I have been thinking of the wounding happening as part of stage 1. I think that the natural expression of our Doing comes out of that place of deep Being. And so, the minute that we separate from our Being, that also hurts our Doing. It also causes our Doing to start coming from a place of control and anxiety instead of creativity and possibility.

But I like that you’re calling out step 5. The actual action is getting distorted or damaged, and then our trust or our confidence in it is getting distorted or damaged, and both of those things have to be healed for that step to be completed, that step of healing our wounded actions.

[01:40:09] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I’m pretty sure any bodily trauma physician is gonna realize, just ‘cause you spot an injury does not mean that’s the totality of the problems, right?

[01:40:20] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:40:20] Andrew: They, they have to check everywhere. So yeah, Yeah, Doing can be wounded more than once in a row, I’m sure. Yeah.

[01:40:29] January: Yeah. But as soon as we’re reconnected to that Being, it starts bubbling up in us again. It is a natural outpouring of Being completely in our subjectivity that who we are as people then leads to actions in the world.

It does not lead to stagnation. It does not lead to freeze and shut down. It leads to caring and embracing possibility and taking risks because suddenly you know that you’re safe, whether you take risks or not. When you’re really grounded in your Being, things just aren’t as scary ‘cause you know that you’re okay with yourself. You know that you’re okay with God.

And so that opens up all kinds of possibilities that are not possible when we’re deep in the trauma of the illusion of disconnection.

[01:41:16] Andrew: This brings us to moment 10, the final step in the Journey, Integration/Balance of Being and Doing. Can you tell me more about balance?

[01:41:32] January: Yeah. I think what I’m talking about there is not only that we want those things reconnected, and we wanna make sure that our Being is coming first and that our Doing is coming out of our Being, but that we don’t want either our Doing or our Being to get excessive at the expense of the other.

Getting into Doing at the expense of Being, that is the next step on the circle, right after the integration. it’s not a one and done thing. At some point we’re gonna split again and when those things are out of balance, then we get in trouble and we have to go around the cycle again. But it can also go the other way, where our beingness is so attractive to us that we get lost in the spirituality of things and we fail to take action.

This is a major criticism that has been lobbied at pretty much every spiritual tradition that has any kind of mysticism to it. That it’s all well and good to have the spiritual experiences, but if that’s all you ever do, you’re missing the point where that’s supposed to serve your fellow humans.

There is a return to the Journey, right? You have to come back into your community with the gift that you have received and figure out how to give it to other people too. And so Being can happen at the expense of Doing as well.

[01:42:45] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:42:45] January: That is far less common ‘cause you have to really, really cultivate being if you’re gonna do that.

And we do not live in that culture. But I can imagine, if you’re living in a monastery and all of the focus is on being and being in that relationship, I can imagine that there are people for whom it would be easy to lose track of their Doing.

[01:43:09] Andrew: Hmm.

Well, I think you got to my follow up, which was, well now tell me more about the inevitability of imbalance and the disintegration that follows. Because yeah, this is a circle. It’s not a straight line. And so, I say the final step, it just means it’s the last one we’re talking about. It’s not the last one to happen and that there will be a continuing movement.

And if there’s not, like you said, if there is no movement onto the next separation and movement through this journey, then that stagnation could be described as Being at the expense of Doing and which is

[01:43:44] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:43:44] Andrew: Is less than what it means to be human.

[01:43:47] January: Yep.

[01:43:48] Andrew: It got me thinking, that inevitability of something coming up. It got me thinking of an interview that I saw Robert Falconer do.

Robert Falconer makes a point where he says, we all live inside of a story. All of us, including the hyper-rational alleged scientist. Uh, I don’t know why he said “alleged,” you kind of twisted the knife there, but alright, Bob, okay. That person has a story about the nature of the world and what’s morally right and wrong and they just pretend that it’s not a story just like anybody else’s, but it is.

And after he affirms that everybody has a story, that all of us are inside one, he says, “I think of stories as prisons we choose to live inside.” He’s like, most often, that’s how they work. And then he goes off and he is talking about that there’s this idea of predictive processing and that your story, if it tells you what’s relevant, what has value, what matters, effectively the story will limit what parts of the world you can perceive.

It will actually determine the world you live in. And so, the point is, according to falconer, we need to get into our story, explore it, and then we need to get out of it. And as he says, “Climb on top of that box and see where you can go next.”

[01:45:13] January: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[01:45:15] Andrew: He even says, these stories we lock ourselves into are really pernicious. I got kind of a kick out of that because was sort of like a tease he was pulling, in this, “Oh, everything’s a narrative man. This is totally like postmodern, like we’re all in a story. This narrative of the narrative.”

And he doesn’t reject all that, but he’s just like, “Yeah, and it’s a prison.” If you’re not careful, you will lock yourself inside. It felt to me — the first time I saw the Creative Journey as a cycle, I was like, “Oh, right, this is totally mythic. Cycles are going round and round. Christians don’t like this kind of stuff. We’re supposed to be linear and moving toward. The inbreaking of the Kingdom is a straight line. It may be parceled out and comes in fits and starts, but there’s a single direct[ion]—"

I don’t have the theology to bring it all together, but it is clear to me from our discussion, and thank you for talking through each step with me and taking each of my questions in turn. It is clear that what we’ve been talking about here, it does make the most sense to me as a cycle. And how big of an explainer this circle is for human experience, I don’t know, but as far as the Creative’s Journey, I think it is necessary that it loops around on itself and it strikes me as parallel to what Falconer was saying about our stories that we’re living inside of.

[01:46:40] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:46:40] Andrew: Uh, if you think about it, even if the title of the story is The Neverending Story, there’s gonna be an end. There’s gonna be a climax, there’s gonna come the thing. And if you’re creating something, I feel like — I’m just spouting off, uh, my personal opinions here, which is, I guess all we’re doing, or all I’m doing on this podcast, but — I don’t mean to say the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t eternal, and that God’s creative act that this isn’t ongoing and timeless in a way that baffles my mind.

I think I’m ready to say all that stuff, but a creative act, a creative journey… there’s a discrete entity implied in that language. And if we’re gonna go on a journey, it’s gonna have an end, which means either we’re dead or it’s gonna happen again.

[01:47:25] January: Yeah. I mean, the folks who think Christianity is linear need to go read Martin Shaw, is all I’m saying. But, uh, everything we see in the physical universe, everything that we are capable of observing as humans says that we are cyclical. There are cycles of nature. There are cycles of planets, our bodies go through cycles. There is a constant process of death and rebirth happening everywhere in the physical world. And to imagine that that is somehow separate from our spiritual life is a really big mistake, I think.

The reality is that the Kingdom of Heaven is not yet fully embodied on earth. That is the end of the Christian story. It’s not, we all get whisked off of earth to some palace in the sky. It’s God comes here to us. The Kingdom of Heaven comes here to us. The end of Revelation is that the Kingdom of Heaven, the new Jerusalem, comes down to earth from heaven and exists here.

And if that’s gonna happen, then the process of getting us there is also going to happen in embodied reality, which means it’s gonna have to be cyclical in some way. The fact that we don’t already live in the Kingdom of Heaven all the time, forever and ever amen, is an indication that something has to change. If nothing needed to change, then we’d already be there. And anytime change is happening, it’s going to be cyclical. that’s how change happens, is that little by little something dies and something else is born so that there’s a gradual change. Was it Max Planck who said, “Physics progresses funeral by funeral”?

[01:49:05] Andrew: Oh, dear.

[01:49:08] January: Yeah. It’s not just that people are bringing in brilliant new ideas. It’s that the old folks with their functional fixedness finally die and make way for the new people, who have different functional fixedness-es that they have to deal with,

[01:49:22] Andrew: Yeah.

[01:49:22] January: but that are a little bit further ahead than the last generation was. And then somebody else will come replace them. And this is a cycle and this is how it works and that’s how we’re gonna get to the Kingdom.

It’s not by avoiding the cycles. It’s not by turning everything into a straight line. But it does mean that since the advent of Christ, it’s no longer just a circle going around in the same direction over and over and over again.

Now it’s a spiral.

[01:49:47] Andrew: Mmmm.

[01:49:48] January: Now it’s going somewhere. There’s another dimension added to the journey.

[01:49:52] Andrew: Yeah. I gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If heaven isn’t fully here, that means there’s things that need to change.

[01:49:58] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:49:59] Andrew: But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happened yet.

[01:50:01] January: Right.

[01:50:02] Andrew: There’s been changes already, so we’re in the midst of something. That it’s cyclical, it makes good sense to me. And the idea of cycle becoming a spiral. One time I saw an animation of the earth going around the sun.

[01:50:12] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:50:12] Andrew: And then they were like, you know the sun’s moving through the galaxy, don’t you? And then the sun starts going, and so the Earth’s

[01:50:18] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:50:18] Andrew: Uh, perfect revolution turns into this corkscrew thing.

[01:50:22] January: Mm-hmm.

[01:50:23] Andrew: I don’t know if that image helps anybody, but it’s definitely one that’s stuck in my head.

Yes. I think that brings us through the Creative Journey and, I got to plug Robert Falconer a couple times

there.

That seems like a good place to wrap this up and let our audience get on with their day. But before we go, January, will you tell us about this episode’s practice?

[01:50:47] January: Yeah. That was something that was important to me in putting this podcast together, was that I didn’t want it to just be a bunch of big, pretty ideas. I really wanted it to be something practical and tangible that we could give people to build up an experience of the things that we’re talking about, and have them not just be intellectual abstractions. So, the practice that I really wanna emphasize in this episode initially is just that practice of making space. And it’s very easy to say those words and it’s a lot harder to actually do that in a culture that’s constantly giving you a million things to do.

Part of the Christian tradition since day one is the practice of Sabbath, and I think especially for Protestants, there’s not a lot of connection to that word necessarily. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s a thing, but what is it? Why do we care?

There are denominations within mainline Protestant Christianity that have more of a connection to it. But in terms of an understanding about what it’s supposed to be, just to cover it briefly, it’s a day to stop.

It’s a day to stop all of your work, whether that’s paid or unpaid, and just rely on God. It’s a day for relaxing. It’s a day for joy. It’s a day for connecting to that relationship with God. It’s a day for putting down all of the tasks that you’re used to doing to keep things running, and giving yourself a living embodied experience of, “Oh, I can stop doing that, and the world doesn’t fall apart. Look at that. Huh.” It’s one thing to know that intellectually and it’s an entirely different thing to actually experience,

[01:52:18] Andrew: Yeah, yeah.

[01:52:19] January: “Oh, I can stop doing that and everything’s gonna be okay!” Or, if I stop doing that and things really do fall apart, which sometimes they do. If it fell apart, then it wasn’t eternal. It didn’t need to stick around forever. It’s okay that it fell apart.

[01:52:33] Andrew: Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

[01:52:35] January: And one of the things that I love to point out when I talk about Sabbath is, that at least in America, in the cultures within which I grew up — I will be specific here because I know that that’s not everybody — Sabbath is kind of treated as the reward for doing all your work all week.

You work your butt off for six days and then you rest on the seventh day, but you have to do the work in order to earn the rest. There’s a lot of, like, we call it the week-end. We have to work first and then we get to play. And one of my favorite things to point out is that that is not biblical.

That yes, God worked for six days and then rested on the seventh day, but humanity’s first day on earth was the Sabbath. We’re supposed to rest first and then work out of what we have received. That’s how that’s supposed to work for humans.

[01:53:27] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:53:28] January: So, I wanted to set that as the foundation of how important rest and space-making is, and so the tradition is that you spend a 24 hour period once a week resting, receiving, communing with God.

I also acknowledge that we exist in a capitalist culture where that is not possible for everybody. That is not feasible for single parents. That is not feasible for people working four jobs to try and keep a roof over their head, right?

So, if, if taking a 24-hour break doesn’t work for you, and that’s just not even an option, some things like practicing stillness throughout the day, where you just put things down and just breathe. Just notice your breathing for five minutes and don’t do anything else. Leave the cell phone in another room so you’re not gonna be distracted if it goes off.

Just practice being still.

Don’t put a bunch of pressure on yourself with this. Don’t try to go for 30 minutes of stillness at a stretch straight out the gate. This is a muscle. You can build it up. Start with one minute. Then move up to three minutes, then move up to five minutes. Try it at different times of the day. Try it first thing in the morning when you wake up, try it somewhere around noon to kinda reset your day, if you’ve gotten distracted. Try it in the evening right before you go to bed. See if it improves your sleep. Test it out and see what works for you.

And maybe it doesn’t work for you. Maybe like me, you have ADHD and stillness is really, really hard. Even at the best of times, that is a difficult thing for me.

But one of my absolute favorite things to do, and again, I have a hard time prioritizing this because we live in a culture that’s constantly demanding attention, but I did not understand the point of meditation until I encountered Les Fehmi’s work on Open Focus meditation. I thought the point of meditation was to make my brain shut up, right?

To make it quiet inside my head. Turns out, that’s not a thing that works. Human brains are constantly going to invent thoughts, and that’s just a thing. The actual goal of meditation is just to be able to notice those thoughts, moment to moment. It’s not to make them stop.

But that form of meditation, I don’t know why, but it has never worked for me. It’s too much in my head. It’s too disconnected from reality. It’s too disconnected from my experience. I just could never get a handle on it. And then a colleague introduced me to Les Fehmi’s work on Open Focus meditation, which specifically reconnects the meditative practice to the physical world.

And I like this in particular because I’ve spent a bunch of time this episode talking about the importance of relationship. What I love about Open Focus meditation is that instead of focusing on an object, you’re focusing on the space between yourself and the object. Or if you are focusing on an object, you’re focusing on your finger or your hand or your arm, you’re putting your attention on the space between the atoms, the spaciousness that is inside even the most solid looking object.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a graphic designer and I’m used to thinking of things in terms of positive and negative space, so it was very easy for my brain to make that switch into looking at the absences rather than looking at the objects. But the minute my brain clicked over, I could feel my entire body relax.

I felt like I was paying attention to the relationship instead of the separateness. And that was so reassuring to my nervous system at a biological level that I still don’t understand even a little bit.

That empty space between the atoms, that space comes into contact with every single particle in physical reality. So, we are all literally connected by the space between us.

[01:57:19] Andrew: Hmm.

[01:57:19] January: And when we can switch and focus on relationship in that way, distance and separateness is an illusion because in fact we are connected by the space itself.

If physical distances or spaces don’t work well for you, try listening for the silence underneath the sounds that you’re hearing, or even go into a quiet room and just listen to the silence for a few minutes. That seems to have the same effect for me, where my nervous system just takes it down a notch. Your reaction might not be that visceral, whatever reaction you have to it is fine. Just notice whatever that reaction is. There’s no need to judge it one way or the other. Everybody’s is gonna be different.

But those are three options: Sabbath, stillness, and Open Focus meditation. Those are three options for really giving our attention to making space in our days, in our lives, in our hearts, to receive what God wants to give us so that we can get filled up and have the energy to then go out into the world and create something new.

[01:58:17] Andrew: All right.

[01:58:18] January: Is there any way that appeals to you, Andrew, in terms of practicing that this week? Tell me one way that you wanna make space this week.

[01:58:25] Andrew: I’ve been working every day, seven days a week for well over a year. And I just realized that I don’t have any classes scheduled on Monday at all, and if you’ve always got another class the next day, there isn’t time to just let go.

So yeah, I think this coming Monday I’m gonna do a Sabbath and I’ll do it like the ancient Israelites. I’ll start in the evening, so Sunday evening and Monday day, that’ll fit well and that’ll be 24 hours.

What about you? Do you have one in mind that you’re gonna try this week?

[01:59:00] January: Yeah. So, I’ve been pretty consistent for a few years now about trying to do a Sabbath practice once a week.

With mixed results, I’m not saying I’m good at it, but I keep trying. But the thing that’s fallen by the wayside for me is that stillness and silence. So, I’m gonna see about trying to make space, like 15, 20 minutes in the middle of my day, to do a reset. To remove myself to another room, to be in silence, to be quiet for that period and see if I can reconnect some of that relationship with the divine before then I come back into the rest of my day. I’m gonna see if that helps with trying to be a little more consistent with how I show up for people around me.

[01:59:37] Andrew: Cool.

That brings us through some practices and uh, I think, yeah, we've been at it for a while. We should take mercy on our audience. But we're coming back! This is just the first episode. There's more coming. So, let's tell our audience what they can expect to hear next week. What are we gonna talk about, January?

[01:59:57] January: Yeah. The next episode we're gonna get into the stories of Sarah and Hannah to contrast two different examples of what we've been talking about this episode, where one person's creativity is creating violence and one person's creativity is creating love in the world. So we're gonna see further examples of that with Sarah and Hannah, in addition to Eve and Mary.

And we're gonna look at the Bible's metaphors for creativity. 'cause the Bible doesn't use the word creativity as we're used to defining it in contemporary English. But it does talk about creative processes, and the number one metaphor that it uses to do that is pregnancy.

[02:00:35] Andrew: Mm.

[02:00:35] January: Pregnancy is how the Bible describes the work that God is doing in the world. It describes the work that prophets are doing to shift cultures. And St. Paul uses the language of pregnancy and motherhood to describe the work that he's doing in the world as an apostle. We're gonna talk about how wildly unusual that is for a man in a patriarchal culture.

[02:01:00] Andrew: Yeah.

[02:01:00] January: So that's what we're talking about next time. Don't miss it. We'll see you there.

[02:01:08] January: You’ve been listening to Theology Kills, a podcast about letting our shame and violence die so that life and love can thrive. Your hosts are January Jaxon and Andrew McRae, and Season One was written and produced by January Jaxon.

[02:01:24] Andrew: Our theme music is “Things to Do in a Day” by Simon Lepine.

[02:01:29] January: Theology Kills is exclusively listener funded.

If you’d like to support our work, or go deeper with practices, bonus content, and community conversations, join our Patreon at patreon.com/theology Kills. You can find everything we’re making at www dot theologykills dot com.

[02:01:49] Andrew: That’s everything we have for you today. Thanks for listening, take care of yourselves and each other,

[02:01:55] January: and we’ll see you next time.